Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers (12 page)

But progress was slow and John was growing impatient. He was pan-frying some sea bass in the kitchen of his two-up two-down in Primrose Hill, a house that seemed to have received all the makeovers his girlfriends would have loved to give him. (Right now the interior of the house was a tranquil space of dark wood and soft creams and whites, or, as his ex-wife called it, a triumph of beige over imagination.)

As he tipped the fillets on to the pre-heated plates he said, ‘I don't know, darling. I really feel as if I've gone as far as I can with the therapy.' As Melanie's eyes narrowed and her mouth moved to speak, he added quickly, ‘Of course it's taught me a lot, but that's just it.' He brightened. ‘I feel I've got the … the coping mechanisms now to manage myself.' Then he made the mistake of adding, ‘And I really can't keep going off in the middle of the afternoon like that.'

‘Five o'clock is hardly the middle of the afternoon. In fact, it's at the end of most normal people's working day.'

‘Well, it's not at the end of mine.'

‘And that's exactly why you need to go on seeing Rupert. You won't tell me what the two of you discuss but I can't believe that he hasn't identified your total obsession with
work as a serious obstacle to any kind of a normal, happy home life.'

John sighed. His working day had started at six, at ten he had gone into court, remaining there for most of the day, and then there had been a tricky conference with a new client. He had driven home hopeful that this evening Melanie might be a little less angry, a little less unhappy and resentful and that he would be able to sit down with a drink and relax, chat without having to search each word as if it might contain explosives.

‘I don't think our home life is unhappy or especially abnormal,' he said.

‘Well, that just shows how removed you are from reality.'

He slammed his fork down on his plate.

‘For Christ's sake, Melanie, we've been through this a million times. You knew when we met that I worked long hours. What really gets me is that at the time you positively approved.'

‘Don't raise your voice at me.'

‘I wasn't …' He stopped as, to his horror, she started crying. He wanted to go across to her and hold her and say he was sorry he'd upset her. But instead he just sat there looking over her shoulder at the fridge door as if his lines were written on the brushed-steel door.

‘You always bring that up,' Melanie sobbed. ‘Why don't you try to understand how I feel
now
, and respect those feelings instead of trying to … well, I don't know … out-argue me. I mean don't you want us to spend more time together?'

‘Well, of course I do. And that's another reason why I want to stop these sessions: to give me more time.'

Melanie blew her nose noisily, looking at him over the tissue with moist, mascara-smudged eyes.

‘That's just stupid. As if you'd spend that time with me rather than staying on in Chambers!'

John reached across the table and took her hands in his.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I'll carry on with the sessions if it means so much to you.'

She pulled free.

‘Don't do me any favours.'

He quelled an impulse to snap at her, saying instead in his mildest voice, ‘I know it's for my own sake and I'm grateful to you for pushing me to do it. You're very good for me.'

‘What do you mean I'm good for you? How bloody patronising can you get?'

He met her angry gaze with a small smile and an expression of polite interest.

‘A lot more, I assure you.'

Her eyes overflowed once again and, pushing the plate with the uneaten sea bass away, she told him that he was hopeless and that their relationship was hopeless too.

He looked mournfully at her abandoned fish. It was getting cold and he had really made an effort, trying out a new recipe involving a freshly made warm tomato relish and some deep-fried parsley.

‘So you have nothing to say?' Melanie picked up a piece of buttered leek with her fingers and put it into her mouth.

‘About what?'

‘About what we've been talking about. About how you're never home. I mean do you realise that you've been working for the past two weekends, and the weekend before that you were with Susannah?'

‘We went to the cinema last Saturday.'

‘That was three weeks ago and the film was about furry creatures living in a magic wood.'

‘Susannah is six; what would you have taken her to?
The Lives of Others
?'

‘That was on ages ago.'

‘Was it?'

‘Is that all you've got to say?' Melanie asked him again.

‘I'm sorry if I've upset you, but …' The sight of Melanie picking at the leeks and leaving the fish uneaten irritated him so that instead of apologising, which had been his plan, he said, ‘… Well,
someone
has to pay the mortgage.'

Melanie opened her bright eyes wide and shook her head.

‘You're unbelievable, do you know that? Unbelievable: rubbing my nose in the fact that you're the main earner. I mean do you think I enjoy being financially beholden to you? Do you?'

‘I don't know,' he said, finishing his fish and speaking in a low, reasonable voice. ‘But I bet it beats working for a living.'

He was put on notice.

‘If you want us to have
any
chance of surviving as a couple then there'd better be some changes, fast.'

As the restless night turned into a wakeful dawn he decided he was not ready to give up on his relationship with Melanie. He had been so sure when they had first got together that this time it would work out and that Melanie would be the woman with whom he would build the next phase of his life. He had imagined them having children, brothers and sisters for Susannah. He had loved her energy and resolve, her willingness to try new things, her way of confronting problems head on, banner flying. This time, he
had told himself, he would only have himself to blame if it did not work out.

So was it him? Was Melanie right? Not just a little bit right about little things but was she generally right about him and his shortcomings? Maybe the truth was that if he could not make even this relationship work then he might as well resign himself to being on his own.

He got up, determined to stick with his therapy and to work on what Rupert Daly termed his ‘relationship skills'. There, he thought, as he shampooed his hair under the shower, he had even managed to use that phrase with only the barest hint of irony. He rinsed his hair, finished showering, dressed and walked off whistling towards the tube.

Then a letter arrived from Rupert Daly saying that he had received an offer to work at a world-renowned clinic in Houston, and that he had decided to accept. It was all rather sudden, he acknowledged, ‘But I'm pleased to recommend my successor, Dr Angie Bliss, bla bla bla …'

‘That seems to be it then,' John told Melanie.

‘What do you mean that seems to be it? We've been through all this. And if this other person is as good as Rupert says she is then there's no reason not to continue with the sessions.' She was on her way to the kitchen window box with the watering can and she paused briefly to give him a smile and to push his hair back from his forehead. ‘Don't look so worried. I really feel we're getting somewhere at last.'

John left his room in Chambers to walk the few blocks to his therapist's offices. He strode along the Strand, his gaze raised, as if he were scanning some faraway horizon, not just a London street in the afternoon rush hour. Quite a few women
and a couple of men glanced as they passed him on the pavement. John did not notice: as usual he was deep in thought. The sessions with Rupert Daly had increased his ability to control his OCD but there were still times, usually when he was allowing himself to relax, read something not work-related, watch some TV, catch up on the newspapers, that he would be sucked down the drain of obsessive thoughts. When he surfaced, exhausted and frustrated, he would find that a whole precious hour had passed whilst he was weighing up the likelihood of having caused an epidemic of blindness in children by failing to remove the large dog turd deposited outside his gate.

Right at this moment, however, he was deep in what he termed ‘legitimate thought', going over the meeting he had just had with a new client. He tried to do at least one case a year for the Bar pro bono unit, although it was getting increasingly difficult to find the time; his recent and public successes had meant that more instructions for ever bigger cases were coming in than he could possibly deal with and the clerks were not best pleased when he turned some down in favour of the unpaid work. ‘You've done your bit,' they kept telling him. ‘More than most, in fact.'

And John would mutter something about how you could never do enough for those in need. But it was all about his own private trade-off: doing unpaid work bought him immunity from OCD. In his mind it went something like this: ten hours spent working for free for someone unable to afford to pay his fees allowed him to ignore the dog-turd-blinded-children, the little-old-ladies-run-over-by-his-big-car-without-him-noticing, the danger-to-Susannah-from-his-reliance-on-the-wireless-network, and the
rest of the pack of feral thoughts that invaded his mind; allowed him to shove them to the back of his brain, where they belonged – for a while at least. But try explaining that to your clerks.

The latest case he was doing pro bono involved a father, Derek O'Connor, whose ex-wife maintained that the couple's three children, all girls, no longer wished to visit their father and his new girlfriend. The father was convinced that his ex-wife was poisoning the children's minds and was appealing a judgment awarding his former wife sole custody.

Mr O'Connor had left his wife for another woman with whom he had now set up home. Mrs O'Connor was seeking to block her husband's access to their three daughters unless he agreed not to bring them into contact with his girlfriend,
ever
, claiming that the girls returned from visits to their father's home in ‘a hysterical state' pleading with their mother not to make them return. Mr O'Connor argued that the reason the girls were hysterical was because their mother had painted such a negative picture of his girlfriend, and lately himself. ‘So they would be, wouldn't they?'

Mrs O'Connor was a pretty woman, slim with a neat haircut and pleasantly dressed in black trousers and a dark-pink jacket, but the moment the name of her ex-husband's girlfriend was brought into the conversation her eyes turned into black bullets and her chin jutted, causing two deep lines to form on either side of her mouth.

‘I'm not having that woman, that tart, contaminating my children.'

John looked away. He never quite got used to the visceral quality of the anger of someone whose illusions had been
shattered. Abigail O'Connor was crying now, hoarse shuddering sobs, and her husband, his client, barely looked at her, turning instead to the file in front of him, making some notes and passing them to John. That was another thing he found hard to get used to: the way you could end up so far removed from the person you had once loved, the person you had promised your entire life to, the person in whose arms you went to sleep at night and wished to see first in the morning, that their deep distress blended into the white noise of everyday life.

Mrs O'Connor had stopped crying and blew her nose.

‘The man I knew would not have been capable of doing such a thing.'

They all said it: the person to whom I gave my heart and my trust and who alone knew each and every soft part of my soul could not have done this to me. It was
that
woman/man/trollop/bastard.

This time, however, John's sympathy was tempered by the particulars of the case. He had to stop himself pointing out that her husband's betrayal should not be a complete surprise, seeing that he had begun his relationship with her when he was still married to the
first
Mrs O'Connor.

‘And that bitch, with no conscience, no morals …' She turned directly to John, ‘You're saying I should put my little girls in the care of someone like that?'

It was Mr O'Connor who replied.

‘I won't have you talk about Roxy like that.'

This was not the wisest thing he could have said, John thought. To defend your new love against your old betrayed and wounded one was not a good idea, not if you wanted to make peace.

‘Ah, poor, defenceless little Roxy. What kind of name is that anyway?
Roxy
. Then again I suppose it was just right for the lap-dancing club where you found her.'

‘She is not a lap-dancer, as you well know.' He turned to John. ‘Roxy is a dance teacher. She teaches children. She's very experienced with young people, actually.'

‘Very experienced, full stop,' Mrs O'Connor snarled. ‘Maybe I should let the parents of those children know exactly what kind of –'

‘You see?' Her ex-husband had slammed his fist down on the table. ‘This is the kind of rubbish she feeds our daughters.'

‘The truth hurts. She is a tart and a home-wrecker and if you think you and your fancy lawyer are going to be able to silence me –'

Her own counsel put a steadying hand on her arm.

‘No one's trying to silence you, Abigail.'

John said, ‘Love, or should that be infatuation, does have a way of making us forget our principles.'

Mrs O'Connor looked at him as if he had just dropped a rat at her feet.

‘I can see what you're thinking. I suppose you've heard all about it from
him
.' She turned her gaze on her husband; mixed with the dislike was something soft. ‘Yes,' she said, her eyes still fixed on him, ‘he
was
married when we met. And now he's trying to convince himself and everyone else that what this woman is doing is no different from what I did back then. But it was, it was …' She started sobbing again. ‘It was completely different. For a start, everyone knew their relationship was on the rocks. This, us, was totally different. We were happy until she came along. We were happy until she took it all away.'